Apple unveils new iPad Pro with tiny bezels, Face ID, and USB-C

The iPad hasn’t changed its look much since its inception. It’s always been a tablet with a prominent home button, a proprietary port, sloping sides, and chunky bezels. That changes today.

The new iPad Pro features a completely new design to what we’ve seen before, looking a bit more like the MacBook Pro family with a flatter design and thinner bezels. The Home button has been removed in favor of FaceID, and the company has switched from a Lightning connector to USB-C (finally!). The new port means you can use a whole new range of accessories – and can even use the iPad Pro as a makeshift battery pack for your phone.

Apple also took a new approach to sizing the iPads. The smaller model gets an upgrade from 10.5-inches to 11 inches in the same footprint. The larger iPad, on the other hand, retains the same 12.9-inch screen size, but shrinks the body down significantly; Apple says its nearly the same size as an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper. At 25 percent less volume, it should make it for a much more palatable size for those who need the extra screen real estate.

Naturally, it’s more powerful. A lot more powerful. It uses an A12X Bionic chip – and upgraded version of the A12 in the iPhone XS – with an 8 Core CPU and 7-core GPU. The new iPad Pro is 35 percent faster than the previous one in single core performance, and up to 90 percent faster for multi-core tasks. Apple says it’s faster than 92 percent of laptops shipped in the last year – including many Core i7 models.

The company also took a bit of a dig at Microsoft: with 2x faster graphics performance, the new iPad Pro is about as powerful as an Xbox One S for gaming, but in a much smaller package.

The company is also refreshing the Apple Pencil for the first time. Most notable is the inclusion of a double-tap feature that should at least partially make up for the Pencil’s lack of buttons. The new pencil also includes magnets to stick on the side of the iPad Pro – akin to Microsoft’s Surface Pen – but now charges wirelessly when attached. There’s also a new Smart Keyboard Folio that involves less origami to get into typing position.

The new 11 and 12.9-inch iPad Pros are available to order today, starting at$799 and $999, respectively. Configurations range from 64 GB of storage to 1 TB. Devices are expected to arrive next week on November 7.